CHICAGO — Ever since he was laid off in March, Frank Beil has been on the lookout.

He keeps an eye out for cars moving slowly down the street or strangers walking along the sidewalk of his suburban Chicago neighborhood. He wonders about the times he answers the phone and the caller hangs up.

“You don’t know if that might be people staking you out, finding out if you’re home or not,” said the 71-year-old hospital chaplain.

Beil is watching for burglars, and police nationwide credit him and those like him for one of the few bright spots of the recession: The number of home burglaries is falling in some cities and towns.

“With a lot more unemployed people, a lot more people are staying home, and they see more in their neighborhood,” said Sgt. Thomas Lasater, who supervises the burglary unit of the Police Department in St. Louis County, Mo., where authorities recorded a 35 percent drop in burglaries during the first six months of 2009.

The trend is showing up in communities big and small.

In Minneapolis, the number of burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year dropped more than 15 percent compared with the same period last year and more than 25 percent compared with that period in 2007. In Boston, the 2,199 burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year are 335 fewer than in the same period last year.

Aurora, Ill., a city of 170,000 outside Chicago, had 560 burglaries through the end of September, a 15.5 percent decrease from the same period last year. In many cities, other crimes including homicide, robbery and rape have been dropping for several years, according to FBI statistics. But burglary stands out because it was rising between 2007 and 2008, and experts expected that trend to continue as the recession dragged on and unemployment rose.

Some police believe the falling price of copper and other scrap metals — a target of burglars who strip the metal from vacant homes — may have contributed to the trend. Phoenix police Detective James Holmes said residents also clearly are paying more attention and that more people are home to keep watch.

“We are getting a lot more calls of suspicious activities in our neighborhoods,” he said.

In some cases, homeowners are even thwarting burglars. It happened in February in Bellevue, Wash., when would-be burglars broke into a home not knowing that the home’s owner was not only unemployed but in the basement.

Then they looked outside and saw that the getaway van they had left idling was gone.

“I drove to a friend’s house up the street,” said Patrick Rosario, 33, who took off in the van after he crept outside. The burglars couldn’t believe what happened.

“My neighbor drove by and saw their faces, and they had big O’s for mouths,” Rosario said.

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